Deracination and Integrity and Divine Mercy

Run, Fatboy, Run (2008) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425413/ opened here on Friday; and I saw it yesterday (Saturday). I frankly hadn't planned to see it ... I went to the theater intending to see one movie, and discovering that I was way off on the showtime, saw this movie instead.

I was very, very pleasantly surprised. The movie has a lot of humor and a lot of heart that go together in strangely satisfying ways ... or for me they do. I like David Schwimmer's work and his brand of humor.

At one level that is.

But at another level ... I think the movie hit me very, very hard in an area that I'm very, very sensitive to: deracination.

The movie is a postmodern work of art, that manages to give us the best that postmodernism can give us in the genre at hand ... but is even so severely limited by its rootlessness, its disconnection from almost anything beyond itself, its distance from anything foundational or meaningful beyond (again) sort of shreds of what was taken for meaningfulness only a generation ago.

And let's give the flick some credit: it's basically a comedy, so probably it wouldn't be very fair to tax it with not having things in it that aren't really appropriate to the genre.

But I'm blogging not about this movie but about Charles in the Here and Now by God's Grace ... and I really felt very deeply two things: (1) I really like this movie; and (2) this movie is generally devoid of rootedness and meaningfulness. So ... what's that say about me?

This: I'm postmodern myself by setz im Leben and by temperament in many ways. I'm deracinated, rootless, detached from meaning and history ... except, to be sure, through the Church, through Christ.

Contrast Mom's generation. They had roots, had generational cues, had historical rootedness and traditions. I got this really strong sense of this last night watching OETA ... which showed, in it's 2nd show, That's Entertainment Part II (1976) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075323/ ... just utterly delightful ... and oh Momma how I wish we could sit and watch this together and talk about it ... and thank God we did get a chance to watch it on OETA and talk about it last year or the year before at the last showing. But I digress. The point for me is that it suddenly hit me that much of what I am mourning in your passing, Momma, is not only the loss of you ... oh Momma nothing can make this anything but utter catastrophic disaster ... yet in addition I'm mourning the loss of what I never had, the sense of rootedness and purpose and common vision that was so eminently present for your generation. I still think about Atonement for the same reason ... really it's about your generation, dear Momma ... and the passing of something that we all, all have lost with the passing of your dear generation.

But the sheer absence of what was once and which I never had is for me a very, very great loss. Not as great a loss of what was once and which I had when you were here and now dear Momma. But a very great loss. And bound up perhaps inextricably with your loss Momma.

I think ... very respectfully, and very much under correction, Momma ... I think that even your generation had at its heart its own fatality ... even in marvels like That's Entertainment, and American in Paris, (1951) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043278/ ... there's already a loss of mooring that later became the deracination of my own generation.

You see it in everything really ... how your generation approached everything ... very goal-directed, as a matter of getting from A to B. A sense that location and family and vocation are very malleable: hence your own migration away from Hornersville; hence your own desire to be buried here in Tulsa rather than Honrersville; hence chances of job and vocation and venue and even family that earlier generations ... even those not too far beyond your own ... would have regarded with a greater sense of stabilitas and gravitas. Your generation, Momma, was Modern: and the Modern preceded the Postmodern.

I remember years ago finding this pressed increasingly on my own understanding of everything. But plain had forgotten. It explains so much. My constant and lifelong hunger and thirst for Justice and Truth rather than a Good Job.

And after a ruff ruff night I realized this morning that in all fairness a big, big part of my sense of loss had to do with my 20th Century loss of Place and Roots rather than my 2007 loss of my dearest dearest Momma.

O Momma how I do miss you

And O Momma how I do miss having a Here-and-Now history.

Love in Christ,

Charles Delacroix
Sunday in the Octave of Easter
Divine Mercy Sunday